Why does yum give "libz.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" error ?

Issue

• yum, rpm, scp and some other commands give below error :

There was a problem importing one of the Python modules
required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was:

   libz.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Please install a package which provides this module, or
verify that the module is installed correctly.

It's possible that the above module doesn't match the
current version of Python, which is:
2.7.5 (default, Mar 20 2020, 17:08:22) 
[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-39)]

If you cannot solve this problem yourself, please go to 
the yum faq at:
  http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/Faq

libz.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory